Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Polkadot, is stepping down as the CEO of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies. Parity is the development company behind the Polkadot ecosystem. In a statement released on Oct 21, Wood shared that he never desired the CEO role. Although he could act as one for an interim period, it was not a position where he saw himself finding “eternal happiness.” Wood shared: “Anyone who has worked with me knows where my heart lies. I’m a thinker, coder, designer, and architect. Like many such people, I work best asynchronously.” He added: “A good CEO needs to …

Blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies has joined forces with the University of California, Berkeley to strengthen the institution’s blockchain curriculum and promote adoption among students and the community. For the 2020–21 academic year, Parity Technologies will work with UC Berkeley’s faculty and students in curriculum preparation, project ideas and other initiatives to strengthen the blockchain learning experience. Parity will also advise students and entrepreneurs looking to launch their next blockchain startup. The partnership centers around UC Berkeley’s Blockchain Xcelerator program, which launched in January 2019 to support new startups and create a globally competitive blockchain curriculum. Since its inception, Xcelerator …

As Polkadot gets ready to launch parachain auctions, a combined fundraising and market interest discovery mechanism, the team is realizing that some core features may be ill-suited for the auction mechanism. Polkadot parachains are somewhat analogous to the sharding proposal for Ethereum 2.0. Each parachain is a largely independent blockchain built for a particular purpose. Many projects building on Polkadot — like Moonbeam, Equilibrium and Acala — are developing their own parachains where the project’s tokens would act as a native currency used to pay for transactions. The parachains are able to communicate with each other through the Relay Chain, …

The Polkadot project released a detailed roadmap on Monday for the highly anticipated rollout of parachains and slot auctions, which should mark the full launch of the protocol. The roadmap is divided into three main stages. The current phase is the Rococo testnet environment, where developers can test mechanisms to communicate between various Polkadot parachains, its analog of shards. The platform uses a mechanism called Cross-Chain Message Passing-lite, or XCMP-lite, to allow parachains to send tokens and generalized messages to each other by going through Polkadot’s relay chain, the central coordinator of the network. The Rococo testnet was launched in …

An update in the OpenEthereum client, the community successor of the Parity client for Ethereum, made the nodes running on the new version essentially useless. The bug appears to have been introduced in the 2.7.2 version of OpenEthereum, upon which the subsequent 3.0 update was based as well. Though the 2.7 release was marked as stable, since June the community started reporting about the client occasionally freezing, which required a manual hard restart for the node. The issue appears randomly “one or three times a month,” and the software fails to notify of its malfunction. Some users have decreed the …

The Polkadot (DOT) project launched a testnet to evaluate its planned sharding implementation based on parachains. The key component that separates shards from being just many independent blockchains is communication. Shards need to be able to communicate with their peers to enable cross-shard token transfers and other forms of interoperability. Called Rococo, the new testnet is designed specifically to test Polkadot’s inter-shard communication protocols. It was released on Aug. 4 and teased by Parity developer Bastian Köcher. At launch, three separate parachains called tick, trick, and track will be available. Developers will also be able to add their own parachains. …

The first token-based vote on the Polkadot network passed in favor of multiplying the DOT supply 100-fold. As announced on Monday, a proposal to give DOTs a “more ergonomic” value was accepted by the community with 86% of the votes cast in favor. Only 4% of the votes were cast against any redenomination, while 10x and 1000x split variants gathered 20% and 24% respectively as tokenholders expressed multiple preferences. The vote lasted two weeks, with 2.86 million out of a total 5.4 million tokens joining in the vote. Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation, the two main entities developing Polkadot, abstained …

The Polkadot blockchain is now fully decentralized and permissionless after a decision passed by community governance removed the admin rights enjoyed by the Web3 Foundation. Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Polkadot developer Parity Technologies, tweeted the unshackling as it happened. The governance proposal to remove special admin privileges was enacted around 8 AM UTC on July 21, which signaled the true launch of Polkadot. Polkadot was live since late May, but it began its life as a permissioned "proof-of-authority" network. The Web3 Foundation both validated the network and had special access to intervene on the blockchain if a crisis were …

A partnership announced on Tuesday between the Gitcoin project and Polkadot will help the interoperable blockchain platform’s developers find community support and funding. Gitcoin’s current function can be considered as an experiment in a new way of funding public goods based on the concept of "Capital-constrained Liberal Radicalism," or CLR, championed by Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin. This works through Gitcoin Grants, a hybrid public funding mechanism that relies both on community contributions and wealthy donors. CLR is similar to the concept of matching donations, but they are not backed one-to-one. Instead, a quadratic funding system changes the weight of each …

Polkadot (DOT) launched a stand-alone blockchain today, although the network is not considered the project’s mainnet yet. Polkadot sits under the wing of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies, and the Web3 Foundation, a type of incubator for decentralized tech. The Polkadot protocol aims to provide compatibility across different blockchains. “There could be more than one chain candidate before it officially transitions to mainnet,” said Peter Mauric, head of public affairs at Parity Technologies. The solution unveiled a testnet of sorts in 2019. Calling the exploratory product “Kusama,” Polkadot did not refer to this as a testnet, but as a “canary …

The Web3 Foundation has pushed back its proposal to redenominate 100x of Polkadot’s (DOT) supply after conducting a community referendum on the Kusama network. While the referendum, dubbed a Polkassembly, largely saw support for the proposal, Web3 noted a “non-negligible amount of opposition, including from some within the ranks of Web3 Foundation and Parity.” Web3 Foundation backs off on DOT redenomination The Web3 Foundation has announced that it “cannot, in good faith, sponsor redenomination” after seeking community feedback on its proposal to increase the supply of DOTs by 100x. The proposal outlined a plan to Plancks, the sub denomination of …

Polkadot is gearing up for its upcoming network launch as it revealed an integration with Chainlink (LINK) on Feb. 25. The integration of Chainlink oracles may be crucial for the development of Polkadot decentralized finance (DeFi) and other advanced smart contracts. Chainlink has completed an initial integration on Kusama, a canary network for Polkadot similar to a testnet. Chainlink was previously available on other blockchains through adapters, but this is the first move outside of the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem in 2020. Polkadot developers will thus be able to access external data by using Chainlink’s oracles. This is crucial to enable …